His New Career Is Soup for the Soul

The meandering country roads leading into Brixton, Ga., where the thick Spanish moss hanging from the stately old oaks resembles funereal shrouds, and the muddy river incubates murderous secrets, might as well bear the warning sign: You are entering an irony-free zone.

Far from the cosmopolitan skyscrapers of the New South, the fictional Brixton, the setting for Sam Raimi’s humid new thriller, “The Gift,” is a throwback to kudzu-choked Flannery O’Connor country.

The townsfolk themselves are a compendium of Southern Gothics: Widow Annie Wilson, played by Australian actress Cate Blanchett, is the local psychic, her readings hovering somewhere between sympathetic psychological insight and darker, dangerous divinings; frightened Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank) is an abused wife trying to break away from her boozing, volatile husband, Donnie (Keanu Reeves); Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi), the local car mechanic, is on the verge of a psychotic break; and flirtatious Jessica King (Katie Holmes) toys with the townsmen with sultry abandon.

So when Greg Kinnear, as earnest school administrator Wayne Collins, enters the picture, the savvy pop culture consumer is apt to do a double take.

After all, Kinnear is the guy who made his mark in the early ‘90s on E!’s snarky “Talk Soup,” airing clips from such trash-TV purveyors as Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake and, with the raising of one eyebrow and a can-you-believe-these-yahoos smirk, dismissing the small-town rubes on display as if they were carnival freaks. Even when Kinnear shifted oh-so-smoothly into making movies, his performances were often surrounded by knowingly ironic quotation marks.

As an actor, his metier has been the urban sophisticate: a spoiled playboy in Sydney Pollack’s remake of “Sabrina”; a damaged gay artist in James L. Brooks’ “As Good as It Gets,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar; a shady cad in Mike Nichols’ comic misfire, “What Planet Are You From?”; and a self-satisfied soap opera star in Neil LaBute’s recent loopy romance, “Nurse Betty.”

His resume offers little to suggest he’d pop up in the role of a decent small-town guy, struggling with an attraction to Blanchett’s lonely Annie even as he tries to satisfy his demanding fiancee, Jessica. (The film expands nationwide Jan. 19 from its exclusive L.A. Oscar-qualifying engagement at the Beverly Center Loews Cineplex.)

“We were looking for someone who had a warmth and likability,” Raimi says of Kinnear’s unexpected casting. “And Greg has that; he has a good heart and a good soul. We wanted audiences to want Kate’s character to have a relationship with him, and because Greg is such a warmhearted fellow, I thought he could portray that, especially since the story, which is told from Kate’s point of view, doesn’t provide him with a lot of back story.”

Actually, Kinnear, 37, wasn’t the first actor Raimi and his producers, Jim Jacks and Tom Rosenberg, envisioned in the part.

“He hadn’t been on the initial list,” Jacks admits. Screenwriters Billy Bob Thornton and his boyhood pal Tom Epperson, who had previously collaborated on 1991’s “One False Move” and who drew on their mutual Southern background in creating “The Gift,” fashioned Wayne for Bill Paxton, who had starred for them in “One False Move.” (Originally, Thornton also planned to direct the film, with Jodie Foster at one time mentioned for the leading role.)

By the time the project was set up at Paramount Classics with Raimi, who demonstrated his own knack for small-town intrigue with 1998’s “A Simple Plan,” at the helm, Paxton wasn’t available, Jacks explains. So the filmmakers next turned to Ron Eldard, who had played a frightening Southern stepfather in Anjelica Huston’s 1996 “Bastard Out of Carolina.”

But after several conversations, Eldard also fell by the wayside. At his agents’ urging, the spotlight then moved to Kinnear. “He’s mostly played more sophisticated types,” agrees Jacks, “but there is something very Middle American about Greg. When you get to know him, his decency comes through. He’s immensely likable, and we thought that was very important for the character.”

“Ironically”--there’s that word, again--”I am from a small town,” Kinnear says, seated at a booth at Jan’s coffee shop on a recent Saturday morning. A native of Logansport, Ind., he spent his first nine years in the heart of the country before his father, signing on with the State Department, led his family on a mini-odyssey that took them first to Washington, D.C., then to Beirut and Athens.

As for the fact that his name wasn’t immediately at the top of the casting list, Kinnear is hardly fazed. “There was a change in the process. An actor fell out,” he shrugs. “All of my great opportunities have happened that way.”

That is almost an understatement: If Tom Cruise hadn’t turned his back on co-starring in “Sabrina,” Pollack never would have plucked Kinnear, who by then was hosting NBC’s after-midnight chat show, “Later,” from the talk treadmill in the first place.

In reaction to Pollack’s unexpected move, the Hollywood establishment raised its own collective eyebrow: What would prevent a rookie like Kinnear, who had abandoned acting at the University of Arizona in favor of a degree in broadcast journalism, from sinking into the romantic souffle, where he’d be mixing it up with Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford?

“You can imagine the horror in Julia’s eyes when she was told she would hook up with me, after she’d worked with Sean Connery, Richard Gere and Brad Pitt,” a self-deprecating Kinnear joked at the time.

But with a star-is-born brio, he rose to the top. Kinnear “is terrific. He’s the only pure pleasure in ‘Sabrina,’ ” senior editor Jeff Giles wrote in Newsweek’s review. “[He’s] a sweet and funny playboy in a camel-hair coat and tennis shorts. He deepens the cad role so much he hurts the climax: We’re rooting for the wrong guy.”

Even as his acting career took off, Kinnear hung on to his day job--or, more correctly, night job--as host of “Later” while grinding out a couple of forgettable films: “Dear God” and “A Smile Like Yours.”

“I was a talk show [host]-slash-actor. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Kinnear says, laughing. “Choose one please. Pick one and move on with your life. It happened so quickly I wasn’t sure what it was I was searching for. I was just stupid enough not to ask myself all the really smart questions and eventually just dove headfirst into the waterless pool.

“I was finding that I was truly challenged, and truly engaged in a much larger way, by acting. Yeah, there were people around me that were very skeptical of that kind of change. But then I got the opportunity to do ‘As Good as It Gets’ in August of ‘96, and that was it. I just thought, ‘This is where my focus needs to be.’ I walked in one morning to the hallowed halls of NBC and asked for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

“And after I made the decision to pursue a career as an actor, it was so clear to me how much I had underestimated the task ahead--the whole process of making a movie: It was, and is, so overwhelming that to try to do that while I was harboring other interests was crazy. Since then, I’ve tried to focus on this gigantic learning curve. I don’t know where I am on the curve at any given moment. I have a feeling it’s not very far off the bottom horizontal line.”

At any time was he worried that the smarty-pants persona he had created for himself on TV would stand in the way of movie audiences accepting him in less smirky roles?

“No director was ever really discouraging to me,” Kinnear says. “I was aware that the TV identification is so strong for people, especially when you go into people’s homes five days a week. There’s much to undo when you’ve made yourself that familiar to an audience. I don’t think I was prepared for how difficult that would be.”

Although he’s never signed on with an acting coach, in the case of “The Gift,” he relied on dialect coach Carla Meyer. “I don’t feel like any of us were trying to break new ground in cinema accents,” Kinnear demurs. “It was really about trying to get some sense what this place was. All of us had to approach it differently given our characters and their different economic backgrounds.

“My guy is an educator, probably went to school at some fairly significant institution and doesn’t have the same sort of sound that [Ribisi’s] Buddy would have. But I haven’t done anything like that before, so it was all new turf for me, except”--he can’t resist tossing in a quip--”for the Brazilian lisp I used in ‘Sabrina.’ ”

As for soaking up the local color, Kinnear says of the production, which shot in and around Savannah, Ga., “Keanu was quite good in finding all the local hangs--not joints but hangs--and introducing us all.”

For the most part, however, Kinnear avoids the glib comebacks you might expect as he discusses his recent work. Speaking of “Nurse Betty,” in which, as soap opera star George McCord, he becomes the target of Renee Zellweger’s unhinged affections, he opens with a joke: “Doing the bad acting was actually quite easy for me,” with commentary, “he said with an arched eyebrow.”

But after a thoughtful pause, he gets down to business, explaining: “The most challenging part of that role for me was making his inability to understand Betty’s illness palatable so that the audience wouldn’t be screaming, ‘She’s crazy, you idiot.’ For me, the trick of the role was: How do you sustain a miscommunicated romance for much of an entire film? That was the trickiest thing about it. But a lot of that was in the script too. A lot of that was already down there.”

That cerebral analysis is typical, say his directors, of Kinnear’s approach to his work. “He really figures out who it is he’s playing,” Raimi observes. “He figures how he should react, what it is he feels.”

Norman Jewison, with whom Kinnear, along with Andie MacDowell, Dennis Quaid and Toni Collette, is filming an HBO adaptation of Donald Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Dinner With Friends,” testifies, “We had a very intensive couple of weeks of rehearsal, and even though some of the other actors like Toni Collette come from the theater, Greg was the first one off the page.

“I think it’s because of his concentration; he’s able to somehow block everything else out and think from his character’s point of view. There’s a playfulness that’s part of his persona, and yet he’s got tremendous intensity. If another actor goes higher, he’s immediately playing off that.”

Although he already has one other film in the can--”Animal Husbandry,” a romantic comedy in which he walks out on Ashley Judd, which 20th Century Fox plans to release in March--Kinnear hasn’t figured out what’s next, beyond simply planning to join his wife, Helen Labdon, later in the afternoon to take their dog, Pads, for a hike in the Hollywood Hills. “It’s still hard to get used to the idea of choosing, of trying to find the right thing to do,” he says.

But it’s just those eventual choices, suggests Jacks, that will determine where Kinnear is ultimately headed: “In terms of his looks, he’s a leading man, but he’s played mostly character parts up to now. He will certainly have a long career as character actor. Will he evolve into a leading man? He could. It’s always a question of the right part in the right movie.”

Kinnear says of the possibility that “The Gift” could demonstrate he’s capable of playing it completely straight: “All of us are defined not only by our abilities but by the opportunities that we get. So whenever anyone looks at you differently, it’s cause for mild enthusiasm.” Said earnestly, without a trace of irony.